Racial Struggles Quotes

I don't think Luke Cage as a superhero is something that has changed dramatically from the '70s to now. He's a black man going through the same thing as other people of colour - it's just that he has superpowers.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.

With all the trouble black people have, they try to forget on weekends. You've got to be good to make them laugh.

It's hard for a black man to raise a family.

I see many black males grasping for some thread of hope. There are so many destructive practices, glimpses into a psychic abyss. That must be very frightening.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Unfortunately, as I tell my white friends, we, as black people, we're never going to be successful - not because of you white people but because of other black people. When you're black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people.

The history of Black Americans in South Carolina is riddled with trials and tribulations.

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

When I think of the trials and tribulations that black men go through in America and that black artists went through, I feel very privileged.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated, that we are indeed messy, that we do our best with what we've been given. We come into the world exactly like you. It's just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against.

The influence of the Shaw Brothers films on my work has been profound. In addition to the richness of Asian culture, we at Wu-Tang were fascinated with the struggles between the oppressed Chinese villagers and the repressive Manchu authority and how it mirrored our own experiences growing up as black kids in America's inner cities.

Black women have to know the historical and everyday struggles of black men, and our men have to know the struggles of black women in America.

The thing that has made the so-called Negro in America fail, more than any other thing, is your, my, lack of knowledge concerning history. We know less about history than anything else.

Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her poetry spanned our journey, chronicled our hearts and documented our struggles as we moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama.

This industry's hard. The world is hard. Being young and black is tough.

Frankly, I think that's something that black people in America have often done - finding ways under very, very difficult circumstances to be subversive, but also to push things forward. And I think that applies to music. I think it applies to dance. I think it applies to a number of things.

I don't know a single black girl who's carefree because it ain't easy being a girl of color, period. God, I wish we were carefree.

And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.

Life is just like a book. Only after you've read it do you know how it ends. It is when we are at the end of life that we know how our life ran. Mine, until now, has been black. As black as my skin. Black as the garbage dump where I live.

It is extremely rough to follow through with my goals, but I felt a responsibility to show the world what the African Americans are facing through this rough patch.

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.